Nowadays, it has become quite commonplace to download various types of information from public communication networks such as the Internet to portable terminals such as cellular telephones and the like, and use the information.
Further, an art wherein IC tags or IC cards are embedded in advertisement posters displayed in public places, and individuals hold portable terminals such as cellular telephones and the like up to the posters to obtain information relating to the poster, such as URLs or the like, with new processing being performed based on the information, is in an implementation stage (e.g., Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2001-160105). Such IC tags and IC cards embedded in the posters are capable of non-contact wireless data communication, and are advantageous in that the external appearance of the posters is unaffected and that maintenance cost can be reduced.
Now, in the past, processing procedures for acquiring information relating to a poster from an IC tag or an IC card embedded in the poster involved all of the data stored in the IC tag or IC card to being first read into the portable terminal, with processing by an application in the portable terminal starting only after all of the data is read in. As of recent the amount of information to be acquired from IC tags and IC cards is tending to increase, due to the increase in the data storage capacity of memory. However, the communication standards used for acquiring the information cannot be easily changed as with memory capacity, and accordingly there is a problem arising that the amount of time over which the IC tag or IC card and the portable device are constrained is becoming longer.
Particularly, in the event that data saved in IC tags or IC cards in posters (so-called “smart posters”) is great in size or includes multiple types of data, data which does not need to be acquired may be automatically acquired depending on the specifications of the portable terminal, and in the event that the communication speed for obtaining the data is slow, a considerable amount of time may be consumed for the data acquisition.